Edgar Allan Poe: The Artist of the beautiful

American Poetry Review, The, Nov 1995 by Hoffman, Daniel

Poe's non-adoptive foster father John Allan had no clue to the scope or relevance of his contrary young charge's ambition. Allan was not the man to infer from young Edgar's seven-mile swim in the James River, in emulation of, or rivalry with, Byron's swimming the Hellespont, how grandiose were his literary aims. At twenty Poe had conceived, and in "Al Aaraaf" attempted to embody, a cosmology, a philosophical aesthetic which enshrined imagination and gave it dominion over a realm untouched by the baseness of human passions or experience of the Time-bound world. The 422 lines of this poem (just a dozen shorter than The Waste Land) show Poe's borrowings from Milton and from Thomas Moore's then popular Lalla Rookh--strange juxtaposition!--in a plot of his own devising. Poe, an omnivorous reader, seized on an encyclopedia account of the observations of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who in 1572-74 recorded the sudden appearance and subsequent fading away of a bright star-what we now know to have been a supernova-in the constellation Cassiopeia. Poe also read, in George Sale's translation of the Koran (1734) a passage describing "Al Aaraaf" as a sort of limbo between Heaven and Hell where reside those "whose good and evil works are so equal that they . . . deserve neither reward nor punishment and will, on the last day be admitted to paradise, after they perform an act of adoration." Poe boldly transformed this description, locating Al Aaraaf on Tycho Brahe's star now invisible to human sight, and making it the realm of Nesace, the spirit of Beauty. Here, on this happier star foretold in his sonnet, passion, such as that between the demispirits Ianthe and Angelo (Michaelangelo Buonarroti) has no place. "They fell: for Heaven to them no hope impartsi Who hear not for the beating of their hearts." What they "hear not" is the harmony of the spheres whose avatar is described thus:

Ligeia! wherever

Thy image may be,

No magic shall sever

Thy music from thee.

Later, in his essay "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846), Poe decided that a true poem must be readable at a single sitting and should not exceed the length of one hundred lines, tacitly admitting that "Al Aaraaf" failed by his own measure. What it succeeds in doing, however, is in making specific the aim that Poe's poems will attempt to fulfill. This is to enact the autonomy of the imagination in its own self-generated and self-contained universe of dreams, where Beauty is its subject and the baseness of the world, subject to the decay of Time, is left behind by the poet with his vision of a happier star.

At this point it is useful to consider "The Philosophy of Composition," the essay that purports to explain how Poe wrote "The Raven" (1845), since it so clearly states the principles enacted by his other poems. The reason for limiting the poem to one hundred lines is that its aim is the excitation of the reader's soul, an effect which a longer poem can only intermittently achieve. Everything in the poem must contribute to this effect-rhythm, sound, rhyme, and especially subject. The optimum subject for producing this effect is the most melancholy, the emotion educed by the contemplation of the death of a beautiful woman. Poe reasons back from the text of "The Raven" to the putative choices by which he claims it was written. Although the poem is driven by an unassuageable emotion, Poe claims its composition resulted from a series of interlocked conscious choices. Over these details we need not pause, but the importance of this essay is its portrayal of the poetic act of creation not as a spontaneous overflowing of inspiration but as the conscious embodiment in verse by a craftsman of his predetermined ideas. Poe's presentation of the poet as Maber, rather than, as with other Romantics, as Finder, greatly influenced French and American poetry and criticism.